Water : Features

13 August 2012

In the past 20 years People & the Planet magazine and its website have published thousands of news reports and feature articles. We have also reflected the opinions of some of the world’s most progressive thinkers. Here founder/editor John Rowley selects a few of these thoughts that still resonate today.

14 June 2012

17 May 2012

It’s drought time in India. Nothing new in this. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live with.

13 March 2012

For the modern Indian city, the principle behind management of water and waste is a simple one: flush and forget. Not surprisingly, most cities are drowning in their excreta, says Sunita Narain, Director of the Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE) in Delhi. Her outspoken Commentary is one with global resonance.

27 April 2011

As popular unrest flares across the Arab world, deeper problems face the region. Population growth and water supply are on a collision course in many countries, raising questions about future hunger, says Lester Brown, writing in the Guardian.

27 April 2011

Johan Rockstrom, Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, calls in this Commentary for a new green revolution which he says could increase food production by 40 per cent by 2050. This, he argues, would create a win-win situation that would reduce poverty and food insecurity - while turning agriculture from a carbon source into a carbon sink.

9 March 2011

China’s South-North Water Transfer Project plans to remove nearly 36 billion cubic metres of water every year from the Yangtze River Basin - which drains much of the nation’s central and western regions - and ship it to the arid North.

24 November 2010

9 February 2010

Some 550 million people in Africa live without electricity and power is critically short in many African countries. But with increasing droughts and climate uncertainty this is not the right time to rush into more big dams when there are so many other promising renewable energy alternatives, says Lori Pottinger